Pick of the week: Code – It’s Trivial

General

• Why Do We Keep Building Tightly Coupled Software: Justin Etheredge points out that as professional software developers it is our responsibility to consider the coupling of code at various levels.
• How Not To Do Dependency Injection In NerdDinner: Jimmy Bogard uses the NerdDinner example application to illustrate a common DI anti-pattern. Tim Barcz responds with a well-worded defense of the patterns.
• Testing With "The Force": If you think a handful of simple test cases are all you need, then Jeff Atwood suggests that you are looking at a world of hurt and pain.
• Don’t Castrate Your Architecture: Ayende Rahien writes about how badly a poor architecture can bit you.
• Introducing CodePaste.Net: Rick Strahl announces the launch of his first ASP.NET MVC project, CodePaste.Net, which is a code snippet shortening site.
• How We Handle Application Configuration: Joshua Flanagan shows the result of his overhauled configuration settings system.
• Best Practices For Individual Contribution: Scott Hanselman gives his advice on effective individual contribution to a Microsoft GM.
• Throw Away And Rebuild Or Refactor From Within: Derik Whittaker looks at both sides or the rebuild/refactor coin.
• MEF Preview 6 Available: Nicholas Blumhardt announces that the latest drop of MEF is available, now with Silverlight goodness!
• Confirming Commercial Availability and Announcing Business Model: The Windows Azure team (finally) announces when we can expect commercial availability and how much it’ll cost. While this is great news, they have unfortunately left hobbyists out in the cold.
• Beautiful Windows 7 Reference App: Kate Gregory writes about an amazing reference application – XP2Win7. As the name suggests it works on anything from XP to Windows 7, but uses the new functionality on Windows 7 to offer enhanced features!
• NHibernate Linq 1.0 Released: Ayende Rahien announces the production-tested 1.0 release of LINQ for NHibernate!

Web Development

• Looking Inside Windows Azure: David Lemphers demonstrates a simple but powerful way to get up close and personal with an Azure deployment.
• Rounded Corner Rendering In Newer Browsers: Rick Strahl shows the power of CSS 3.0 and how easy it is to make rounded corners.
• Encrypt Your Web.config Please: A slick little tool to encrypt sections of your web.config file on your local or remote computers. Based on comments received he’s posted a follow up question, and finally hammers his point home with a concrete example.
• Silverlight 3 Released: Scott Guthrie officially announces that the latest version of Silverlight has shipped and gives a rundown of the highlights.
• Using A Controller To Manage Static Resources: Daniel Crenna shows how you can use ASP.NET MVC to add best practices to static content.
• Improving jQuery’s JSON Performance and Security: Dave Ward demonstrates how to take advantage of the browser-native JSON parsing that is finding its way into modern browsers.
• Detect Copy, Paste, and Cut Operations On A TextBox Using jQuery: Suprotim Agarwal shows why there is no awesomeness greater than jQuery.
• Wean Yourselves Off View State From The Start: Milan Negovan writes about the very first thing you should do when starting a new ASP.NET web project. I couldn’t agree more with his suggestion!
• How To Server The Same Data In JSON, XML, or HTML With ASP.NET MVC: Using the power of extensibility, Mark Jensen has put together a way to return various formatting of view data from ASP.NET MVC.
• Monitor Your ASP.NET Cache API Behavior: As with many technologies, the ASP.NET cache can either give you a considerable performance boost or, if misused, can end up hurting performance. Simon Ince has put together a number of things to look at to determine if your caching is working to the best of its abilities.
• Computing With JavaScript Web Workers: John Resig (the guy who created jQuery!) takes a look at web workers, a way to run JavaScript in parallel without blocking the user interface. Currently available in Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, workers can offer a lot of computational power – all from the comfort of the browser!

Pick of the week: All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions

General

• Understanding Expression Trees: Marcin Kasprzykowski takes a look at expression trees, which were introduced in C# 3.0.
• One Public Type Per File: Chris Eargle examines a few of the many reasons why you should never have more than one public type per source code file.
• Running Development From a RAM Disk – Options and Products: Jeffrey Palermo follows up his previous post with some concrete products and recommendations.
• Pulling Others Up: When faced with less-than-best practices on the job, Jon Kruger recommends demonstrating the right way rather than berating the wrong way.
• Oh, You Wanted the “Awesome” Edition: After being burned by the arbitrary memory limit in Windows Server 2008 Standard, Jeff Atwood writes up a well deserved rant about market segmentation.
• Move the Chair: Rod Paddock makes an insightful observation about technical debt at the local Red Robin.
• SubSonic 3.0 is Released: Rob Conery announces the 3.0 release of SubSonic, the easiest way to do data access.

Web Development

• Principles, Code-Behind, & View Engines: K. Scott Allen writes about code-behind files, and how they can easily become broken windows that will undermine maintainability of your project.
• How We Do MVC – View Models: Jimmy Bogard kicks off a series of posts about how his team has implemented ASP.NET MVC in a real-world project.
• Never Worry About ASP.NET AJAX’s .d Again: Dave Ward shows an elegant way to call ASP.NET AJAX JSON services with jQuery. In other news, jQuery totally rocks!
• JavaScript Shortcuts: Kevin Babcock has two simple shortcuts to tighten up your JavaScript.
• Coding in the Cloud – Rule 1 – Cache Is Your Friend: Adrian Otto has some excellent tips on using cache to dramatically speed up your web application.
• HandleUnknownAction in ASP.NET MVC – Be Careful: David Hayden points out a potentially tricky error in the documentation for the HandleUnknownAction method.
• Not Blocking the UI in Tight JavaScript Loops: Stuart Langridge shows a simple way to avoid locking up the browser.
• Why ASP.NET MVC C# Developers Should Learn Ruby on Rails: David Hayden explains how valuable it is for ASP.NET MVC developers to learn RoR.

Pick of the Week: Resisting Dependency Injection

General

• How PLINQ Processes an IEnumerable<T> on Multiple Cores: Igor Ostrovsky walks us through the different possible implementations of processing an enumerable collection across multiple cores.
• Life After Loops: In a simple & elegant example, Justin Etheredge demonstrates how LINQ not only makes your code more readable, but opens up the possibility for some extra perks.
• Mocking Indexer Setters with Moq: Bertrand Le Roy reveals the trick to getting the value from a setter mocked by Moq.
• Speeding Up the Build – Ditch the SSD and Go For the RAM Drive: Jeffrey Palermo speeds up his build using a RAM drive.
• System.Data.OracleClient Update: Himanshu Vasishth announces that as of .NET 4.0 the Oracle client that comes with the framework will be depreciated.

Web Development

• Application Pool Identities: It’s not exactly new news, but it is a neat new feature that lets you run your application pools under a unique account without needing to create or manage it!
• Automagic Time Localization: Nate Kohari shows a dead-simple way to get users’ time zone.without making them pick from a list of every time zone on the planet!
• WCF Instancing, Concurrency, and Throttling – Part 2: Rick Rainey helps to make sure your WCF services are configured correctly to achieve the best throughput.
• Session Attacks and ASP.NET – Part 1: Jason Montgomery takes a look at different ways session state can be attacked, and how well ASP.NET fares against them.
• Session Attacks and ASP.NET  – Part 2: The second installment of Jason Montgomery’s posts about attacks against session state.
• Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out – Hidden Costs: Jeff Atwood investigates two different ways of scaling web applications, and it’s not as black-and-white as you might expect.
• JSON Hijacking: Phil Haack makes us aware of a JSON exploit that could reveal sensitive information to an attacker.
• The Weekly Source Code 43 – ASP.NET MVC and T4 and NerdDinner: Scott Hanselman shows off some wicked-awesome stuff you can do with T4.
• Scalable Web Applications: A great presentation by Eli White (formerly of Digg) on scaling your web apps.

Pick of the week: And Get Rid of Those Pesky Programmers

General

• 10 Commandments for Creating Good Code: Alberto Gutierrez plays the Moses of coding and presents his commandments to all of the world wide web.
• W is for.WeakReference: Jim O’Neil takes a look at the WeakReference, a way to keep objects in memory where it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they were garbage collected.
• Stop Using Structs Everywhere: Chris Eargle outlines when you should and should not use structs – hint: it’s much less often than you might think!
• Let Your Inversion of Control Tool Work For You: Joshua Flanagan points out how little your code should actually be using the IoC container directly.
• Working with Memory Mapped Files in .NET 4.0: Salva Patuel demonstrates some of the basics for working with memory mapped files in .NET 4.0.
• AnyCPU Exes Are Usually More Trouble Than They’re Worth: Rick Byers reveals the hard truth that making your executables architecture-neutral may not be as beneficial as you may think.
• Visual Studio – Why Is There No 64 Bit Version.Yet: Rico Mariani explains why Visual Studio remains a 32-bit process, and it’s at least partly due to the same reasons Rick explained in the above article.
• Breaking All the Rules with WCF: Scott Hanselman wields the power of WCF extensibility to meet the requirements of a client who wasn’t exactly doing things right on their end.
• Zen and the Art of Project Management: Nate Kohari announces that has not dropped off the face of the planet. Also, he announces his new startup, Zen.
• The Most Powerful Development Tool Ever Made: Justin Etheredge explains how a search engine can be your most valuable tool.
• You’re Not Your Data Access: Rob Conery reminds us that there’s much more to an application than how you get data out of a database.

Web Development

• Using Request Inside Actions – Why It Is a Bad Idea: Simone Chiaretta explains why letting ASP.NET MVC do its magic is a much better, simpler, and more elegant solution.
• ASP.NET MVC Installer for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and Roadmap: Phil Haack announces the availability of an installer for ASP.NET MVC in the beta of Visual Studio 2010, as well as what’s coming down the pipe for MVC.
• 11 Keystrokes That Made My jQuery Selector Run 10x Faster: Dave Ward shows off the beauty and power of jQuery by fine-tuning a selector to increase performance by 10x – using only 11 characters!
• Integration Testing Your ASP.NET MVC Application: Steve Sanderson has put together a pretty slick little tool for easily running integration tests against ASP.NET MVC.
• A View from the Cloud: Maarten Balliauw demonstrates how you can pull your ASP.NET MVC view files from Azure blob storage.

Lots of good stuff this week – not one, not two, but three posts worthy of ‘Pick of the week’ treatment!

Picks of the Week

• I Hardly Recognize You
• Fighting Technical Debt with the Wall of Pain
• A Different Shade of Rose, or “How to.actually, I’m not up for subtitling this one”

General

• The Future of GhostDoc: Roland Weigelt has a big announcement about GhostDoc, an awesome Visual Studio plug-in for generating code comments.
• What I Look For in a Code Review: Mike Hadlow lists the main points that he looks for when reviewing others’ code.
• Git For Windows Developers – Git Series – Part 1: Jason Meridth walks through how to get Git up and running on a Windows machine.
• Why goto Still Exists in C#: Steve Wellens shows how the ‘goto’ statement still earns its keep by reducing code complexity.
• The Girl Who Proved P = NP: Jeff Atwood reminds us that in programming, the first step is often knowing when you are truly screwed.
• VS2010 Tutorial – Building VS Extensions with the Beta 1 SDK: Jason Zander demonstrates how easy it is to build Visual Studio extensions in VS2010.
• Your Testbed Has to Have the Same Volume of Data as on Production in Order to Simulate Normal Usage: Despite the fact that this should be a no-brainer to anyone, here’s a simple example as to why.

Web Development

• Microsoft Web Platform Installer: Scott Guthrie writes about the Web Platform Installer, which is hands down the simplest way to bring your development or deployment environment up to speed.
• An Alternative Approach to Strongly Typed Helpers: Phil Haack investigates an alternative to using strongly typed helper functions in ASP.NET MVC, which have quite a bit of overhead associated with them.
• Silverlight 3.0 Plus Out Of Browser Equals RDA: Jacek Ciereszko demonstrates how to turn a Silverlight application into a rich desktop application.
• V Is For.Velocity: Jim O’Neil takes a look at Velocity, Microsoft’s distributed cache.
• Indonesian MVP Releases Open Source IIS Log Analyzer: Jas Dhaliwal announces a new project by Agus Kurniawan.
• Moving to the Cloud: Toby Negrin shares some details of his team’s latest work on Sherpa, a distributed key-value store.
• Introducing Page Speed: Google announces their own take on a browser-based performance test tool.
• IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit: An awesome new tool from Scott Guthrie’s team that’ll analyze your site for SEO best practices.
• Check Your Silverlight 2 Apps for Compatibility with Silverlight 3: Tim Heuer explains how you can test your existing Silverlight 2 applications with the upcoming version 3.
• Visual Studio 2010 – Multiple web.config Versions: Gunnar Peipman shows off a neat feature in VS2010 where your web.config is essentially a template for versions specific to the project configuration.

Pick of the week: The Holy Grail is NOT Automation

General

• .NET 4 Cancellation Framework: A post by the Parallel FX team about how you’ll be able to build cancellation-aware applications in .NET 4.0.
• Why Defer Loading in Entity Framework Isn’t Going To Work: Ayende Rahien has first-hand experience as to why the approach being taken for lazy loading in the Entity Framework isn’t going to work.
• Partitioning in PLINQ: The ParallelFX team shows what’s going on under the hood when you are processing enumerable data.
• Adding Custom Search Providers to Windows 7 Plus Advanced Search Tricks: Scott Hanselman demonstrates how you can use simple OpenSearch-based connectors to add functionality to your Windows 7 search box!
• The Greatest Exception Handling WTF?!? of All Time: Lee Dumond shares an ‘exceptionally’ bad example of exceptions usage.

Web Development

• Five Ways to Speed Up Page Response Times: An excellent collection of simple ways to improve the client’s experience on your web site.
• Google Ware: The Sky is Falling and Flash/Silverlight are Dead: Time Heuer looks into Google Wave and tries to figure out where all of the FUD is coming from.

Pick of the week: IP and Non-Competes for Employees

General

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1: Go get the first beta of the next version of Visual Studio!
• Microsoft Set To Announce Commercial Availability of Windows Azure at PDC This Year: Alin Irimie has some news about launch of the Azure Services Platform.
• Parallel Tasks – New Visual Studio 2010 Debugger Window: Daniel Moth shows off a new debugger window for working with tasks, which are now a full fledged member of .NET.
• Preview of ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010 Coming Soon: A sneak peak of the next version of ReSharper taking advantage of the new IDE features of Visual Studio 2010.
• Sneak Preview – Entity Framework 4.0 Testability Improvements: The ADO.NET team previews a number of enhancements in vNext of the Entity Framework that result in better testability.
• POCO in the Entity Framework: Part 1 – The Experience: What good is an announcement without a demonstration? The ADO.NET team shows us what POCO in the Entity Framework currently looks like.
• Friends Don’t Let Friends catch(Exception): Lee Dumond reminds us why you should only catch exceptions that you are prepared to handle.
• .NET Framework 4.0 – Using System.Lazy<T>: Gunnar Peipman demonstrates how to use the Lazy<T> class in .NET 4.0 for lazy initialization.
• A First Look at Moq: Brett Schuchert outlines how Moq is a different animal from other popular mocking frameworks.
• Protecting Against XML Entity Expansion Attacks: Tom Hollander explains what an XML entity expansion attach is and how to protect yourself.
• Why Isn’t My Encryption.Encrypting: Jeff Atwood exposes a rather stupid ‘feature’ of .NET’s SymetricAlgorithm implementation.

Web Development

• Project Descry: Learn what it takes to make effective visualizations, starting by taking a look at a set of open source, web-based examples.
• ASP.NET MVC for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1: Phil Haack explains the current state of ASP.NET MVC in the first beta of Visual Studio 2010.
• Don’t Use Response.End() with OutputCache: Rick Strahl shares a recent d’oh moment.
• ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing: Maarten Balliauw dives deep down into ASP.NET MVC to extend it to include route data in the domain in addition to the application path.
• 15 Free Functionality and Load Testing Tools for Web Applications: An excellent list of free functionality and load testing tools.
• Web Design Industry Jargon – Glossary and Resources: A very extensive and complete glossary and resources for web designers and developers.
• I’m Committed to Two Tool Development: Jesse Liberty points out that Visual Studio and Blend each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and there is no single tool that provides all of the bells and whistles.

Pick of the week: The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line

General

• Open Source or Die – The *Real* Future of Graffiti: Lee Dumond addresses the lack of any forward development of Graffiti CMS and implores Telligent to hand it over to the capable hands of the community.
• XYZ Is Bad For Performance: Sasha Goldshtein makes the point that when it comes to performance, make sure you choose your battles carefully.
• Sneak Preview – Persistence Ignorance and POCO in Entity Framework 4.0: The ADO.NET team gives us a sampling of good things to come in the next version of the Entity Framework.

Web Development

• Donut Hole Caching in ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack writes about caching the donut hole instead of the donut.
• Creating Your First MVC View Engine: Nick Berardi shows a simple, straight forward example of how you can create your own view engine in ASP.NET MVC.
• Custom Controller Factory in ASP.NET MVC: Keyvan Nayyeri examines how to use the controller factory as an extension point for ASP.NET MVC.
• Why Async Pages: A great reminder about when and why you should be using async pages.